


you can't be missed if you never go away

by brophigenia



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alive Noah Czerny, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anal Sex, Car Sex, Grinding, Horror, I really don't even know what this is, M/M, Riding, but i've not been in the mood, i guess, i know y'all want some vampire fic, it's been a rough couple weeks, kind of?, mentions of barrington whelk, mild religious themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-06
Updated: 2019-04-06
Packaged: 2020-01-05 23:14:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18376049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brophigenia/pseuds/brophigenia
Summary: Sometimes, K looks around and feels a dim sort of surprise, a low thrum ofwrongnessthat is hard to swallow back.(AKA, K and his older, stoner boyfriend Noah Czerny go for a drive. With sexy, if horrifying, results.)





	you can't be missed if you never go away

**Author's Note:**

> what even is this

_ do you remember  _

_ the late morning  _

_ when we went back to bed?  _

_ *** _

Sometimes, K looks around and feels a dim sort of surprise, a low thrum of  _ wrongness  _ that is hard to swallow back. There’s always Prokopenko there to knock shoulders with, though, and at the touch he’s okay again, no longer frightened for no reason like a little kid having a nightmare. 

Henrietta is a playground, an echoing cavern of  _ Hillbilly fucking nowhere  _ where there are no consequences— no cops who care enough to pull them over, no way to flunk out of a school with a wing being constructed with his last name on it, nothing but the streets and the sky and the drugs. Waiting, seventeen and ripe for all the ultraviolence the world can offer, all the blood and the money and the power he can almost  _ taste,  _ metallic like gold and mineral like soil. 

(Sometimes, K looks in the mirror and can’t recognize his own reflection, feels like something’s missing. Shoves down the feeling, takes another pill.) 

***

The scar is gnarly: a lightning bolt of a thing, ghostly-pale tissue grown up over freckled, golden flesh. It was the first thing K noticed, the first time he laid eyes upon its owner, Noah Czerny who worked the counter at Nino’s Pizza despite the fact that he had a trust fund the size of the treasury of some small countries. 

Noah Czerny, who’d beat a murder rap and taken  _ manslaughter  _ instead, spent fourteen months in medium security and come back to Henrietta instead of disappearing into some Ivy League refuge. 

Noah Czerny, whose long fingers were always fidgeting with some trinket or another, who drove the same red Mustang he’d had as an Aglionby student with the world at his feet. 

(Sometimes, when he was in a Mood, K would think about how War was supposed to ride a red horse, in all the stories of the apocalypse he’d grown up hearing at Mass. Then he’d usually call himself a  _ fuckin’ geek ass spaz,  _ and try to forget the thought.)

Noah Czerny, who K had wanted from the start. From the first time he saw that scar. From the first time he saw the way he turned a steering wheel, all nimble wrist and even breaths. 

(Noah  _ Czerny,  _ who K had fooled himself into thinking he’d  _ gotten,  _ before realizing that Noah wasn’t the kind of thing you could really  _ touch,  _ much less brand and leash the way K preferred his things to be kept.) 

Twenty-four looked good on Noah, who had just enough Aglionby charm left to stave off  _ sleazy  _ and instead was  _ rakish.  _ Not a  _ loser  _ but a  _ layabout.  _ Gone from Raven Boy to a transplant townie ex-con for K to tow around like he had something to prove. 

***

“You’ve reached the voicemail of Vladimir Kavinsky.” K’s father’s voice says in his ear, harsh on the consonants and nasally on the  _ V,  _ too-foreign. Too obvious. “Leave a message at the tone.” 

“Why the fuck don’t you ever answer your goddamn phone?” K barks, pretending like it’s not a whine, not a plea.  _ Give me attention. Talk to me. Where  _ are _ you?  _ “Graduation is June 2nd. You better fucking be there.” He clicks  _ end  _ without saying  _ bye.  _ Throws the phone down, wants to stomp on it. 

***

“Tell me you  _ like  _ it,” K insists for what feels like the hundredth time, skinny thighs gone taut and hands shaking against Noah’s belly, too tremulous to brace himself with any reliability, riding his cock with a kind of clumsy earnestness that makes him seem like a virgin. No matter how much he does it, K can’t ever seem to figure out the smooth, graceful rolling and bouncing that all the porno twinks seem to have been  _ born  _ doing. It makes him feel too-young, stupid and undesirable. 

Noah doesn’t speak, never speaks, closes his eyes and tips up his chin, hand reflexively tracing the scar on his cheek, over and over. K wants him to say something— say  _ anything.  _ Anything to make him feel like he’s not alone in this room, this cavernous warehouse Noah calls home, empty except for a couple of crates, a skateboard, a battered laptop, the bare mattress they were currently fucking on. 

“Tell me—“ he tries to say again, insisting, and Noah’s free hand lifts to shove a couple fingers into his mouth, careless, just to shut him up. 

K shakes, and shakes, and  _ comes,  _ throat aching with how he wants to cry, or maybe scream. His hands ache with how he wants to curl them into fists or maybe claws, to bruise and tear at Noah’s flesh. 

(Would Noah trace  _ those  _ wounds with the gentlest fingertips, when they became scars? Would he care for K like that, when all he had left of him was the mark of his violence, his rage?  _ Why don’t you see me?  _ he wants to shout.  _ Why aren’t you looking?)  _

Noah doesn’t even protest when K rolls off of him, though his still-hard dick flops wetly onto his stomach, red-purple. He wraps a hand around himself, hand slick with K’s saliva, pulling slow and tight from base to tip and then back again, breathing stuttering when he twists his own wrist. Like he couldn’t care less that K left him high and dry. Like he couldn’t care less that he’s got K next to him. Like it’s all the same— jerking off and  _ fucking his boyfriend.  _

K knocks his hand away, contorts his body so he can swallow down Noah’s cock, choking on it because he’d never spent much time  _ giving  _ blowjobs. Never had to. He was Joseph  _ fucking  _ Kavinsky. A king. 

_ The  _ king. 

(Why does that feel like a lie?)

Noah sighs, a little bit  _ something—  _ amused or exasperated, maybe. Not overcome. It makes K insensate, so furious he’d like to  _ bite.  _ It makes him so…  _ something.  _ Jealous, maybe, except there’s nobody to be jealous of, nobody who’s left any kind of mark on Noah. 

(Nobody except Barrington Whelk, dead now seven years. It would be foolish to hate a corpse with so much vehemence, especially if that corpse was someone K had never even  _ met.  _ He was still playing SoulSilver on his Gameboy Advance when Whelk last walked the earth. He hates him anyway, and burns with shame at his own foolishness as he swallows Noah’s come.) 

***

Ronan Lynch has the fastest car in town. 

K waits months before he lets himself catch Lynch on 3rd Street, side-by-side and waiting for the lights to change. He’s been watching Lynch for months, knows everything about him, the only son of doting, if absent, parents. The golden boy, always laughing with his head thrown back, whistling a jaunty tune on his way to class. 

(Noah is as languid as ever in the passenger seat, thoroughly stoned. He’s switched the song playing from Pharoah to Soundgarden,  _ Black Hole Sun  _ not exactly the best race music but it’s K’s own fault for giving Noah the aux cord in the first place.)

Ronan Lynch, with raven-dark ringlets and a jaw so chiseled it could have been carved from marble, handsome to a fucking fault, revs his engine. Says  _ you wanna?  _ with a tilt of his chin, inquisitive and playful. Like this isn’t an auspicious moment, full to the teeth of  _ destiny.  _ Like K hasn’t been waiting for this moment with bated breath for so long it seems like it’s been forever, like they haven’t been planets caught in orbit for so long it’s shocking to be this close. 

K revs back,  _ you fuckin’ bet,  _ and when the light changes his breath catches. He doesn’t breathe the entire race, flying so fast it doesn’t feel real through the Henrietta streets, chasing Lynch’s Subaru with the sort of reckless abandon that he’s never felt before, a rising hysteria trying to bubble past his lips and dying from lack of oxygen in his throat. 

Lynch spins out so fast that K can’t correct his own course, spins and shuts his eyes tight, full of empty, profanity-laced prayers that they won’t collide. The spinning goes on for what feels like forever, and when he opens his eyes, K realizes that Lynch’s car has stopped spinning, too, leaving them nose-to-nose and so close it’s  _ impossible _ they didn’t collide, at some point. 

_ Impossible,  _ except not, because they didn’t. The world is black and unknowable around them. Lynch’s Subaru seems abruptly  _ wrong,  _ in the nonsensical way that so many things suddenly seem  _ not right  _ to K, paranoia high and nausea following it, breathless vertigo that  _ usually  _ rights itself when K reminds himself he’s acting like a complete fucking  _ headcase.  _

Not this time. Lynch is staring, nose bleeding from a probably connection with his steering wheel, and he’s not staring at  _ K.  _

He’s staring at  _ Noah,  _ who is staring  _ back,  _ eyes open-wide instead of weed-heavy, so blue they don’t seem real, one hand covering the scar on his temple. His mouth moves, forms Lynch’s name—  _ Ronan.  _ Urgent and  _ wrong.  _ It’s all wrong. Everything is wrong. 

(Why had he waited this long to race Lynch? When had he learnt patience? What the fuck was  _ happening?) _

K throws the Evo into reverse with vehement violence, tires  _ screaming.  _ Everything is wrong. Noah doesn’t comment as they fly through the darkened Henrietta streets. He’s a ghost in K’s passenger seat, pale as a sheet and still touching that  _ fucking  _ scar. 

K hates him, hates him,  _ hates  _ him. 

He doesn’t realize he’s fucking  _ crying  _ until they’re on the highway, racing imaginary demons driving invisible chariots drawn by made-up hellhounds with everything blurred by both speed and tears. He feels every minute of seventeen, feels the hovering menace of graduation hanging overhead, feels the absence of coke in his veins and the half of an apple he’d managed to choke down yesterday heavy in his stomach. 

Noah is silent as the grave beside him, doesn’t try to get him to stop the car or even slow it down. Doesn’t seem to care either way, if they get pulled or if they die. 

_ (Death,  _ on a pale horse, and K had spent so long pretending that he hadn’t thought of it that he’s surprised to see the looming white hood of his own car in front of him, right past the dash. Willfully ignorant. Pretending like he wasn’t a damned thing, already. Scared like a child. Fuck.  _ Fuck.)  _

“Is this hell?” He asks in a shaking, small voice, barely audible above the protesting roar of the engine as he flattens the gas pedal to the floor. 

Noah doesn’t respond for a long minute, and K thinks about Prokopenko, back at the dorms— silent and always there, knocking their shoulders together. When had he last spoken? Why hadn’t K noticed that he’d not heard Proko’s voice in months, or maybe even years? 

_ Jiang,  _ he thinks, naming the shockingly empty space around his body for the first time, names that conjure up shadowy half-forgotten faces,  _ Skov, Swan.  _

“I don’t know.” Noah says, voice faraway. “I don’t think so.” 

“You don’t  _ think  _ so,” K repeats, pitch rising, horror rising, bile rising. He’s going to vomit. He’s going to wreck the car. In his periphery, right at the corner of his eyes, Noah is a shivery, pale mess of a thing, and nothing like the older, indifferent man who K had been fucking for months, now. 

“What is  _ happening?”  _ He begs, not speaking solely to Noah. He sniffles, the sound wet and snotty. Childlike, terrified. Unable to breathe properly, lungs not wanting to expand fully. 

Noah still doesn’t ask him to stop the car. K wonders if it matters. Wonders, even as he recoils almost bodily from the thought, what would happen if he jerked the steering wheel  _ hard  _ and sent them sailing through the guard rails, hurtling into the dark. 

He stops the car, tires squealing as he stomps on the brake. There are no other cars. Haven’t been, even though this is a  _ highway  _ and there  _ should be.  _ They are alone, the dark encroaching, barely warded off by the Evo’s headlights. 

“What’s happening?” He whispers, helpless, and scrubs his hands over his face, shivering all over. He turns to Noah, who seems almost-normal again, as long as he’s looking at him straight-on. He repeats himself, hands shaking so hard he can barely undo his seatbelt. “Noah, what’s  _ happening?” _

He’s hard, somehow, and he crawls over the gearshift to press himself to Noah, clammy everywhere they touch. Their mouths meet, Noah’s not indifferent for once as he trails kisses down K’s chin, sucks a hickey into the underside of his jaw, petting him all soft and gentle through his jeans with those much-admired hands that now seem too-spindly, unreal and spidery. K shuts his eyes, curls his own fingers into Noah’s tee shirt. 

The smell of decay is high in his nose; he opens his mouth and breathes through it, instead. Ignoring the horror, the creeping realizations that want to stir to the surface of his mind. 

Noah grinds his palm against the front of his jeans, harder than before, and it feels so good to be touched that K doesn’t even care about the rough chafe of the denim or the way Noah’s teeth have gotten sharper against the thin skin that covers the prominent bone at the hinge of his jaw. He comes right when he’s sure Noah will break skin, gasping and pressing his face into Noah’s throat to hide from his teeth and his eyes and his  _ scar.  _ The scar he knows Noah is touching even now, with the same hand he’d killed his roommate with, his best friend, his own would-be murderer. 

(What the fuck had  _ happened  _ that night? Who the fuck had they been, those two boys who’d left their dorm room and went into the woods seven years ago? Had  _ either _ of them ever come back out?) 

Noah inhales roughly once, and then his hand comes down to stroke soothingly up and down K’s back, smoothing his shirt back down. The come is cooling in K’s jeans, cold and uncomfortable. Noah’s skin is cool, and it feels good on his own, overheated and sweat-slick. 

“Baby,” Noah calls him, the word strange and misshapen. He must hear it, the wrongness, because when he says it again, it sounds better. Straightened, like a picture frame hanging crooked on the wall. “Baby, let’s go home. It’s late.” Like they’ve just gone out for a drive, casual, like there’s nothing waiting out in the dark, lurking.  _ Waiting.  _

There’s not much K can do except agree. He thinks of refusing, but can’t figure out how to arrange the words into anything less ridiculous than  _ no, let’s stay here forever. The dark can’t get us here. I’m scared. Hold me.  _

He crawls stiffly back into the driver’s seat, turns the steering wheel with hands that barely remember how to shift into drive. 

Noah’s hand curls around his thigh, fingers feeling impossibly long. When K glances down, apprehensive, they  _ look  _ normal. 

It’s a long drive back to town. 

They don’t meet any other cars. 

***

_ there is no time for hesitation now  _

_ you come  _

_ or go _

**Author's Note:**

> follow me @ brophigenia.tumblr.com


End file.
